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Perhaps this is a dead thread, but I just got around to reading it after previously following some of Duncan's posts about PP being a woman.

In regard to any item of conspiracy "evidence," I like to begin with the threshold question, "What sense does it make?" I used to regard Baker's and Truly's encounter with LHO in the second floor lunchroom as one of the most compelling pieces of evidence pointing toward his innocence. But the PP discussion has caused me to ask, "What sense does it make?" If an elaborate conspiracy had been put into place to frame patsy LHO for the assassination of JFK, how could the conspirators possibly have allowed LHO to be anywhere where he might be seen by multiple witnesses or even photographed during the critical time period when he was supposedly in the sixth-floor sniper's test assassinating the President? How could the conspirators possibly have risked blowing the entire conspiracy by allowing Oswald to wander around inside the TSBD or even outside onto the front steps? Is there a scenario in which this makes any sense?

I'm not trying to be provocative or stir a heated debate, but truly, "What sense does it make?" Having framed LHO with the rifle and shells, wouldn't it have made far more sense to make sure that he was on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting, even if he had to be locked in a closet until the assassination was over?

Certainly PP is as worthy of investigation as any other avenue of research, but realistically what are the chances that the one person in the photo who cannot even be reliably identified as a man or a woman "just happens" to be our mysterious friend LHO - and if it is, how on earth did the conspirators allow him to get there? I am now inclined to believe that the accepted timing of the lunchroom encounter is off by enough to have made it more likely that LHO could have descended from the sixth floor to the second. In any event, I would like to hear from someone who can articulate what sense it would have made in the context of an elaborate, well-orchestrated conspiracy to have allowed the patsy to be standing outside the TSBD at the time he was supposed to be in the sixth floor sniper's nest shooting the President. It seems to me to be begging the question to begin with the premise, "Well, he COULD have been outside on the steps because we KNOW he wasn't in the sixth floor sniper's nest."

As one who began my recent return to assassination research as a pretty confirmed conspiracy theorist, I am beginning to see that much "conspiracy logic" makes sense if one accepts the existence of an elaborate conspiracy as axiomatic, but perhaps not so much if one doesn't.

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I believe I have previously reviewed most or all of that massive thread, which mostly deals with the "technicalities" of the lunchroom encounter and the photographic evidence. Is there a portion where you believe the threshold question "How could sophisticated conspirators possibly allow the patsy to be anywhere other than the sixth floor at the time of the assassination?" is addressed? In other words, if LHO were PP, or LHO were in the second floor lunchroom too soon after the assassination for him to have been the sixth floor gunman, how would that make any sense in the context of an elaborate, sophisticated conspiracy that hinged on him being a convincing patsy?

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I believe I have previously reviewed most or all of that massive thread, which mostly deals with the "technicalities" of the lunchroom encounter and the photographic evidence. ​More than just that it catalogs everything what is wrong with the official story from the statements by the TSBD employees to Lee Harvey Oswald's interrogation and the only conclusion is that the whole thing, the so called official story, is one giant fairy tale. Add on from a photographic p.o.v. this person does resemble Oswald as much as people like to twist and turn it. Is there a portion where you believe the threshold to you! question "How could sophisticated your term conspirators possibly allow the patsy to be anywhere other than the sixth floor at the time of the assassination?" is addressed? Why does this need addressing?This is a threshold question to you! Plus no one can place him there in the first place. Texas justice, high profile case, lots of media attention...... In other words, if LHO were PP, if he is not who is your candidate? or LHO were in the second floor lunchroom too soon after the assassination for him to have been the sixth floor gunman 2nd floor lunchroom encounter has been disproven all thoroughly explained in that particular thread and Greg Parker's work how would that make any sense Sense? After everything that has been thrown at the people by 'them' and what has been hidden and/or destroyed, are you for real? in the context of an elaborate, sophisticated conspiracy that hinged on him being a convincing patsy? Texas Justice? Hoover? Black Ops? Anti communist sentiments?

I would like to add the times this was all happening in, there is plenty of evidence of miscarriages of justice and Texas during Henry Wade's tenure miscarriages of justice was ten times the nation's average. Sophisticated......not in the least.

If you had read that whole thread and cataloged it all then you would understand that there is just way too much wrong with the official story of that segment of the case, now 5 decades later it is safe to say a pattern has emerged......

A conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States, involving some combination of Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, the CIA, Army Intelligence, the Secret Service, the Dallas Police Department, the Postal Service, anti-Castro fanatics and perhaps others was not necessarily an elaborate, sophisticated conspiracy? I would have assumed it was.

OK, LHO is Prayer Person. We will concede this for the purpose of argument. He was standing outside the TSBD immediately before, during and after the assassination. He could not possibly have fired shots from the sixth floor sniper's nest. The man is as innocent of the assassination as Shirley Temple. Beautiful - I love it.

My point is: What sort of Keystone Cop / Three Stooges conspiracy would have planted a rifle traceable to LHO in the sixth floor sniper's nest, thereby framing him as the assassin, but have stupidly allowed him to be standing outside the TSBD, in a position to be seen by scores of people and possibly even photographed, during the assassination?

Is the suggestion seriously being made, "The conspiracy was so watertight that it would have made no difference if Oswald had been sitting next to LBJ - he was going to be fingered as the sixth floor assassin. The fact that he was allowed to be standing outside the TSBD just shows you how confident the conspirators were." If so, this would seem to me to be a prime example of what I have come to lovingly refer to as "conspiracy logic."

The question I am asking does not hinge on any vast knowledge of the intricacies of the PP photo or anything else. To point out that the Emperor was not wearing any clothes, the observant child in the Hans Christian Andersen tale did not have to know anything more than that the Emperor was nude. The sense I am getting is that the question I am posing is impertinent and the answer is of no consequence.

Just thinking logically, my working hypothesis would be that, inasmuch as the conspiracy (if there was one) did involve planting a rifle traceable to LHO on the sixth floor, PP is more likely to be Shirley Temple than LHO.

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My thanks to Greg Parker for providing a thoughtful response that has given me some food for thought and some additional resources to consider.

Lance, I have watched you utterly destroy the H&L crowd with your impeccable logic and persuasive elegance. It's been a delight to watch. But in many ways maybe you have fallen victim to their tactics and reason for existence. I just hope you don't throw the baby out with all that dirty bathwater. Some researchers have integrity and are not just interested in selling their particular 'brand'. Some don't just cling onto a theory for dear life despite overwhelming new evidence to the contrary, and some are prepared to admit their errors and change their views accordingly. Those espousing PM all fit into that category. If it's wrong, it's wrong and it's back to the drawing board.

A high resolution scan of the PM film would prove conclusively who is stood in that doorway. Should it be the case that it is LHO then your talk of 'sophistication' goes right out of the window. Maybe the initial plot didn't need a patsy. Maybe it was meant to look like a conspiracy for other reasons? If the objective was to soften up the American public for an invasion of Cuba, a conspiracy with unknown confederates "still on the loose" would have served this purpose better. I believe vital sections of the American establishment, horrified by the potential perilous global consequences, insisted on the investigation being closed down. "Find us a LN! And now!"

The miniscule problem of Lance or Bernie 50 odd years down the road insisting that there may be a problem with the lunch room timeline, or a possible glimpse of the assassin in the wrong place pales somewhat with the real possibility there and then of a chain of events that could very easily have led to WW3.

Which problem would you rather have to deal with?

Edited March 6, 2016 by Bernie Laverick

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The miniscule problem of Lance or Bernie 50 odd years down the road insisting that there may be a problem with the lunch room timeline, or a possible glimpse of the assassin in the wrong place pales somewhat with the real possibility there and then of a chain of events that could very easily have led to WW3.

Which problem would you rather have to deal with?

Thanks, Bernie. As I said, I don't discount PM as a worthy subject of investigation. If PM should prove to be LHO, that would indeed be a stunner. But then I would still be asking myself, "OK, how do we explain this? What does it mean?" I have watched several PM videos over the last couple of days, including an almost two-hour documentary by the guy who operates prayer-man.com, and I was struck that the angle I am pursuing never even got a mention.

The obvious big disconnect is, "If you're going to plant LHO's rifle in the sniper's nest, how could you possibly allow LHO to be standing outside in full view during the assassination?"

To attempt to answer my own question, one explanation might be: LHO's rifle wasn't planted until after the fact. It was planted not by the assassins but by the cover-uppers. The rifle that was found actually was a Mauser, perhaps left by the assassins because there was something about it that pointed away from them. But the cover-uppers needed (or thought they did, anyway) to immediately finger a Lone Nut to calm the public and avoid WW3 (as LBJ was warning), and LHO was heaven-sent. LHO was not directly involved in the assassination, may not even have known an assassination attempt was going to take place, and was simply standing outside the TSBD with his co-workers. But as a former defector to the Soviet Union, he was an ideal patsy. This is consistent with what LHO said: It's clear on the video he wasn't saying "I'm a patsy of the assassins" but rather "I'm a patsy of the DPD - they have arrested me only because they know I defected to Russia."

By this theory, the actual assassination could have been the work of anyone - my proposed tight group of rabid anti-Castro Cuban exiles and their CIA trainers and advisers being a likely choice. Perhaps they didn't even try to conceal their conspiracy; they just blasted away from two or three different angles and made their getaway. Perhaps they did leave a Mauser behind, either to steer the authorities away from them or to send a message of some sort. LHO was presumably known to them but was not their pasty; where he was during the assassination was irrelevant. The post-assassination cover-up had nothing per se to do with them, but solely with preserving the illusion that LHO was a Lone Nut.

I'll have to admit, this strikes me as somewhat far-fetched and not entirely consistent with the evidence, But I do sort of like it. It makes more sense to me than (1) a super-duper, high-level, multi-agency assassination conspiracy, followed by (2) an elaborate, massively complicated cover-up to preserve the illusion there was no conspiracy. If (1) were true, we should not need (2). A conspiracy planned and carried out by some combination of the CIA, FBI, Secret Service and Army Intelligence should not require a Rube Goldberg, Keystone Cop cover-up. But if there were essentially no connection between the assassination conspiracy and the cover-up, which was intended only to preserve the after-the-fact illusion that LHO was a Lone Nut, then many things click into place - including the fact that the cover-up was so unbelievably clumsy.

I'm just thinking out loud, which is always dangerous, but that's one explanation that occurs to me after three Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stouts (which are made in California but are quite good).

As lay people, it might be difficult for us to understand just how complex and multi-leveled a conspiracy by the intelligence community to assassinate JFK actually was. The plan likely included several scenarios, from a multi-shooter action sponsored by a Communist state to a lone nut firing from from an upper window, with many versions in between that; and all interchangeable at the last minute. For all we know, there were many patsies in several locations around Dealey Plaza that day, each with a file containing Back Yard Photos and a history just as interesting as that of LHO.

Controlling a patsy is another question, and not as easy as it might appear. The fact that LHO kept no close companions made him an ideal candidate but, still, controlling his movements, and keeping him out of sight until the shooting was over would be next to impossible. Think of it, how would you keep Oswald on the 6th floor with a Presidential motorcade passing by, without arousing suspicions in him? If not killed out right during arrest, might he not say something in a press conference about the "strange men" that asked him to go to the 6th floor at 12:23?

The Mauser may have been placed on the 6th floor because the selection of a patsy might have been made at the last minute, and LHO was not the first choice. However, something might have happened (Victoria Adams?) to reverse this decision, and the conspirators might have decided to go with LHO at the last second. The Mauser could have been the weapon "belonging" to the other patsy (Dougherty?) and the sudden rush into the TSBD of police could have prevented the conspirators from swapping the Mauser for the Carcano.

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I have had the opportunity lately to carefully study the Duncan MacRae/Albert Doyle photo-argument at the giga-thread Who Is Prayer Person? at Duncan's forum. And am posting this to endorse their conclusion that the figure is a woman. Duncan's synopsis is at p. 498 of that thread, and Albert's sharp insights begin on p. 405.

I predict they will be vindicated, once a digital scan is achieved, and these two much-maligned gentlemen should take heart. One day the research community will esteem their gallant efforts in this PrayerMan arena. Adherents of the PrayerMan-is-Oswald thesis should brace themselves for profound disappointment.

It is not easy for me to acknowledge this, since I have embraced Sean Murphy's thesis about 6 years now. And even incorporated it into the conclusion of my recent essay Inside Job. But there are several features of the PrayerMan figure that I did not properly understand, until I got my clock cleaned by their impressive photo-scholarship.

In retrospect, one of the parameters that led to the Oswald conclusion does not seem to me stringent enough. This was the parameter that PrayerMan must be a TSBD employee, since the other employees (who have all been placed) said they saw no strangers there.

The height argument, irrefutable as far as I can tell, gives a result of 5'6" or even less. This may have been a woman who worked at the Dal-Tex. She would be quite familiar with the Elm/Houston park-area stucco-work and with the TSBD entranceway, from lunchtimes or just going back and forth to work. It occurred to her, while out to view the parade, and being at a height disadvantage, that she could get an unobstructed view up on the entranceway landing. She spied the west side open. She and several of the TSBD employees probably knew each other by sight, but not by name, and no one even gave it a second thought when she went up the steps. For viewing a presidential motorcade, the Depository landing was basically just another place outside, open to the general public.

This is of course speculation, but we will be looking for some kind of reasonable answer once the realization hits home that PrayerMan is actually PrayerWoman. We may never discover her true identity. But the real riddle we are trying to solve is- Where was Oswald during the shooting? It should be satisfactory enough to be able to conclude that Oswald was not on the landing.

I favor the lunchroom, as I am heavily-disposed to the view that Truly & Baker were double-timing it through the warehouse and reached the 2nd-floor landing only 50 seconds after the shots. My opinion is that Oswald went up there from the domino room about 12:25, shortly after seeing Jarman & Norman pass by on their way to the west elevator.

In any case, what turned the tide for me was looking at the Weigman gif and understanding that, while PrayerMan was lifting his elbow, too little of the dark west wall was visible (left of his elbow) for him to be tucked into the corner. He had to be standing at the front edge of the 4-foot-wide landing. And then it was easy to understand that his illuminated forearm had to be intersecting the sun-shade plane that sliced down through the alcove.

With Darnell's camera-line forming an approximate 20-degree angle through PrayerMan and then intersecting the west wall, the tangent of 20 degrees (i.e. the opposite divided by the adjacent) multiplied by the 4-foot landing (i.e. the adjacent) will give us PrayerMan's distance from the west wall (i.e. the opposite). That works out to 17.5 inches, about a foot and a half.

PrayerMan is only about 5 feet from Frazier. Both of them are standing at the front edge of the landing. They are both nearly equidistant from Darnell's camera, which is roughly 45-50 feet away. PrayerMan is no more than one foot further away from the camera. There is a near one-to-one correspondence between PrayerMan's perceived height and Frazier's perceived height.

There is a very small height loss (actual minus perceived height) because PrayerMan is one foot further away from the camera, 2% or so (1/50th), or about 1 1/3 inches, tops. But this is negligible. Even an eyeball comparison tells you he's way too short to be Oswald- he's a full head shorter, at least 6 inches shorter than the 6-foot-tall Frazier.

The 2 1/2-foot-tall radiator is about 4 1/4 feet behind PrayerMan. You start to lose any semblance of a one-to-one correspondence between PrayerMan's perceived height and the radiator's perceived height. You get somewhere around an 8-9% (4 1/4 divided by 50) exaggerated measure for PrayerMan's height by comparing him one-to-one with the radiator (like Tony Fratini's 5'9" Tie Man on p. 520 of that thread). This exaggeration is about 5-6 inches. PrayerMan is not standing next to the radiator, not even on the other side of the glass. The Weigman gif proves this. He's at the front edge of the landing. So you get an exaggerated sense of his height if you compare him one-to-one with the radiator.

I was OK picturing Oswald in a buttoned-up work shirt, but the irrefutable height argument has turned him into PrayerWoman, for me. That's my two cents on this. We should still strongly pursue getting a high-tech digital scan made, so that all minds may be convinced. That would bring about a healthy seachange in the psychology of the research community. I think one lesson that will be learned from this endeavor is that even a low-resolution film image has objectively-verifiable information that precludes certain conclusions, i.e. there's still stuff you can definitively figure out from a poor-quality film image.

Duncan and Albert deserve much more respect for the stand they have taken. To those who oppose them, consider the merits of their photo-argument. Consider how the mainstream media, armed with a digital scan, would destroy the Oswald-is-Prayerman thesis. And lick their chops, further marginalizing the JFK research community.

Great work!

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Whether or not Prayerperson is a man or a woman, both Duncan and Doyle proposed that, despite the poor quality of the photo, they could recognise a woman's purse and the buttons on the persons coat. (Duncan appears to have retreated form his buttons theory- however, Doyle continues to preach the buttons are there for all to see.)

Edited March 28, 2016 by Ray Mitcham

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In any case, what turned the tide for me was looking at the Weigman gif and understanding that, while PrayerMan was lifting his elbow, too little of the dark west wall was visible (left of his elbow) for him to be tucked into the corner. He had to be standing at the front edge of the 4-foot-wide landing. And then it was easy to understand that his illuminated forearm had to be intersecting the sun-shade plane that sliced down through the alcove.

The area shaded in yellow shows the part of the TSBD entrance that was out of direct sunlight.

Based on TSBD being off line to North and the sun Azimuth of 185 Degrees at 12.30 on 11.22.63.

Do you still think that the arm of Prayerperson, standing against the left wall would be in sunlight, Richard?

Edited March 28, 2016 by Ray Mitcham

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You may wish to compare your estimate of the shadow cast by the western wall with the 3D reconstructed shadows using SketchupPro program. The figure below shows the shadow which was received by placing the doorway model onto its proper place at the Dealey Plaza and setting the time to 12.31, November 22, any year (estimated time of Darnell's filming). I see the shadow as depicted in your drawing occuring at about 1.05-1.15 (the interval refers to the uncertainty of my reading of the exact position of the shadow relative to the vertical rail of the glass door).The shadow as reconstructed by the SketchupPro model accommodates the possibility of Prayer Man standing close to the western wall with perhaps only the back of his right hand exposed to the sun.